2nd Sunday in Lent
As a young person I read some of the popular mystery works of the day. I think most people remember or at least have heard of Nancy Drew. Never liked her very much; too lady like. I liked Trixie Belden because the hero was someone with whom I could identify: the quintessential tom-boy. Fearless and compassionate. Inclusion counted more than power. Did I also mention she was not an adult, but someone close to my age? I like Nevada Barr’s mysteries because they happen in places of great natural wonder and because of Barr’s gritty and fearless protagonist who, midway through the series, marries a local sheriff who is also an Episcopal priest. Talk about the ultimate bi-vocation!! It turns out Barr is herself an Episcopalian who wrote a work of non-fiction about how she found faith at a very low point in her own life when she more or less stumbled into an Episcopal church during a Taize service. Why? The door was not locked. My latest read is Fr. Flenn, a former CIA agent turned Episcopal priest who, while trying to bury his past, uses all his CIA wiles to solve the crime. And then there is, or sadly was, Mark Sweitzer, author of the notorious liturgical mystery series where a small town North Carolina sheriff who is NOT a priest but rather a classically trained organist and choir director, solves some of the most bizarre crimes that always seem to revolve around St. Barnabas Episcopal church. The wonky titles include The Alto Wore Tweed, The Bass Wore Scales. If you love classical liturgical music, you will find the stories entertaining and find that your Episcopal musical and liturgical knowledge will help you solve the crimes. Like who murdered the organist Agnes Day?
Today’s reading from Mark the start of a mystery and the clues are in the reading.
Remember: Jesus has been baptized, gone to the wilderness, and then bulldozed (ok, not bulldozed but walked) his way all over the remote corners of Judea. Note: rural Judea, not Jerusalem. We would say Jesus did most of his ministry in fly over country. Already the people in power are seeing him as a threat to their notion of who should have the reigns of power. They don’t see the clues. Peter doesn’t see the clues. We have read this story so many times we perhaps don’t see the clues.
First we have to figure out the question we are asking, like a good detective or scientist.
Just what or who is this Messiah? That , my friends, is what the Gospels, and for that matter the Epistles and all the other books of the New Testament are trying to answer. Why is Jesus wondering the backroads of a place that I am sure the Romans hated? I suspect they wanted to avoid their stint in military service in that backwater place called Palestine. I can hear the soldiers grumbling when they heard that was to be their next deployment. And it wasn’t just six months at a time. Perhaps it was for years!!
But back to the question: who or what is the Messiah to be? Mark is always out of breath, everything moves quickly as he announces that God is coming. Peter has figured out Jesus is the Messiah and he has given up everything to follow Jesus. Jesus says he must go to Jerusalem and be killed. Peter may well be prepared to die for Jesus, for the Messiah, but the Messiah must not die; he must become the King
Today Jesus drops the big clue. Did you catch it?
He calls Peter the accuser, the prosecutor. Jesus makes it clear the Messianic secret is that the nature of the Messiah is not at all what Peter thinks. The Messiah is not going to be someone who spends his life teaching and healing and then dying of old age. God’s purpose is not fulfilled in that manner. Instead, it will be fulfilled by the ignominious crucifixion of God’s chosen one. There is no redemption without the cross. Why? Because God was willing to demonstrate how much love God had for humanity by becoming human, undergoing all the emotions and the physicality of being human, so that God could let us see that love. Without the death, and the overcoming of death, this could never be shown. Satan, the accuser, the prosecutor, could not tempt Jesus into being anything but the Son of God, the Human One. The Human One will overcome all the powers of evil, of which death is the ultimate.
But Jesus did not stop there. Even though he knew he was to lay down his own human existence for all of humanity, he made it clear that was not the endgame.
I think of Peter and the disciples, the men and the women, who followed him and were with him at that very moment. He does not mince words with them. If you want to save your life, you will lose it but if you are willing to lay down your life, your own human existence, you will save it. This is not a riddle!! It is the essence of the Gospel message. Jesus issues a call to action. It is not enough to say you are Lord and Savior; you must act on it and must do so by the example set by Jesus himself.
Are you going to heal the sick? Tend to the suffering of the world? Feed those who are hungry? Matthew 25 lays it out with the sheep and the goats. John lays it out with the Gospel of love.
I think much of the time Christians get the first part of the message: Jesus died for my sins, but then the process shorts out like a bad electric circuit. Does it mean that if I confess Jesus as my Savior it is a once and done thing and I am assured of a ticket on the train to heaven? Does it mean that I must live my life by a strict personal moral code and that failure means I forfeit the ticket?
Jesus was a Jew. He had read the Torah and the Prophets. Remember that the first scroll he read in public was Isaiah and Isaiah’s pronouncement of good news. He had read Amos and Joel. In Judaism justice is defined by how the most vulnerable in a society are taken care of. The chief purpose of human government was to watch out for the most needy in society. Jesus knew all of this and when he said he had come to fulfill what was said in the law and the prophets, he knew whereof he spoke and that what mattered was justice.
So your life in God is at the center of the what and the why of Jesus; the length of your life is not.
We are saved from eternal death, but we could easily die for Jesus. Take up your cross. This is the hard part, the part from which Peter and you and I so often want to shrink. Challenge injustice wherever you see it. Feel the hungry and fight for programs to end food insecurity. As the old saying goes, when you give food to the hungry you are a hero; when you ask about the root causes of hunger you are a communist. This Lent may be a good time to step out of your comfort zone. We have been careful for the past year trying to keep safe during a pandemic that cares not who falls victim to it. We are grieving the loss of part of our own lives and of the very existence of so many. I am grieving what I believe to be a failure of leadership and grieving what I see as rising inequality and injustice. I do not see this as anything that Jesus would have told us to do or to be.
Howard Thurman, the black theologian and mystic, called the poor, the disinherited, and the dispossessed those with “their backs against the wall.” He said Jesus was, as a poor marginalized Jew, one of them. No force of society can destroy a people unless it wins the war against their spirit. Fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the Three Hounds of Hell, can destroy them. But centering their life around the message of the Gospel, that Jesus identified as one of them and one of us, can be the anchor that helps all of us hold on to our humanity and remember the humanity of all. He said not to fear each other but only fear God. Hatred destroys all of us; therefore love your enemy.
Thurman’s words are those of Jesus. If we are to call ourselves Christian, we must heed these words from Mark. Being a Christian seems like it is not good news at all, yet it is the only Good News we need to hear. Martin Luther King, Jr., always carried a copy of Thurman’s work.
Right now I am tired; what I see happening around me is the antithesis of the Gospel message. I really would like to spend my time not being involved in the public arena. I would like to say to God, “May I please have a break?” But vacations don’t come with the contract.
God never said anything about life would be fun or easy. But he did say what would grant us shalom, that deep and abiding peace.
Take up your cross and follow Jesus.
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